This weekend brings back Spectre and it is said to be terrific. It should be all the more terrific since it is playing at a local Dolby Vision cinema, an AMC Prime auditorium – The Burbank 16.

It is not a huge room, nor a huge screen. But it is a huge amount of light being thrown across the distance of 16 rows of executive plush leather seats by a couple of souped up Christie built laser projectors, then splashing onto a low gain white screen. Manufactured by Christie, but the secret sauce is all Dolby.

The measured brightness is set for 106 candela per square meter (cd/m²), a term which is often called ‘nits’ in the biz. (If you want the deprecated term of foot-lamberts, divide by pi. ) [edit: We have later been told that the translation from foot lambert to candela per meter square should be on the high side – that is, the dual laser system is putting out 108 cd/m². The low-gain white screen is critical since the opposite (high-gain and/or high-gain and spray-painted aluminum flakes, often called ‘silver screens’) is notorious for having extremely out of spec hot spots and poor smoothness and dim contrast and horrid vignetting of both darkness and color shift. . . not talked about much since one doesn’t like to pi. . . well, one doesn’t like to do a lot of things that make associates look bad. . . OK. . . associates looking bad might be OK or not OK, but you don’t want clients looking bad, and high-gain screens was one solution for many clients with Dolby 3D systems.  

[……]

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This weekend brings back Spectre and it is said to be terrific. It should be all the more terrific since it is playing at a local Dolby Vision cinema, an AMC Prime auditorium – The Burbank 16.

It is not a huge room, nor a huge screen. But it is a huge amount of light being thrown across the distance of 16 rows of executive plush leather seats by a couple of souped up Christie built laser projectors, then splashing onto a low gain white screen. Manufactured by Christie, but the secret sauce is all Dolby.

The measured brightness is set for 106 candela per square meter (cd/m²), a term which is often called ‘nits’ in the biz. (If you want the deprecated term of foot-lamberts, divide by pi. ) [edit: We have later been told that the translation from foot lambert to candela per meter square should be on the high side – that is, the dual laser system is putting out 108 cd/m². The low-gain white screen is critical since the opposite (high-gain and/or high-gain and spray-painted aluminum flakes, often called ‘silver screens’) is notorious for having extremely out of spec hot spots and poor smoothness and dim contrast and horrid vignetting of both darkness and color shift. . . not talked about much since one doesn’t like to pi. . . well, one doesn’t like to do a lot of things that make associates look bad. . . OK. . . associates looking bad might be OK or not OK, but you don’t want clients looking bad, and high-gain screens was one solution for many clients with Dolby 3D systems.  

[……]

Read more